favorite recipes from a Northwest kitchen

Simple Lentil Soup

I haven’t posted a lentil soup here in weeks. Weeks! Hopefully you’ve been managing to get by alright with that red lentil soup from last month. And did I ever mention that you can and should make The Best Soup of 2011 with green lentils?

But what do you think I EAT around here, people? Oh, right, that kale salad. Every day. But also: lentil soup. And this week it’s this lentil soup. It’s a recipe that’s been in my life for a long time, but I never get tired of it. I try out a lot of recipes, as you might have noticed. Some are duds (you’ll never hear about those, shhh). Some are momentary infatuations. Some I make season after season, year after year. This soup falls into that last category.

And since it’s late April and I’m talking lentil soup, I guess it’s time to come clean about something: seasonality be damned, I make soup year-round. Avert your eyes if you must, or haul your laptop over to right in front of your air conditioner to read about it. I live in Seattle, after all, and feel that I am entitled to take advantage of the few meteorological perks available in this region. So I will be making soup as the weather permits (i.e., all summer long).

This is one of those recipes that I got from a friend a long time ago and I don’t know where it came from before that. So if you are the inventor of this precise combination of ingredients, thank you. It’s perfect. I haven’t changed a thing. My friend says the Parmesan rind is what makes it so good, which may be true, but if you don’t have one handy I imagine that you could add the flavor by stirring in some finely-grated Parmesan cheese at the end. And if you’re vegan I am pretty sure that you could get away with leaving the Parmesan rind out and adding one pinch more salt–but I haven’t tried that. I don’t want to mess with perfection.

Finally, don’t forget that in the time it takes this soup to cook you can easily bake a homemade bread. This week I’ve been baking this easy little oat bread, but a whole wheat soda bread or even a beer bread would be perfectly nice as well.Simple Lentil Soup: Finely chop 1 onion, 2 carrots, and 3 garlic cloves. Cook in olive oil over medium heat (covered but stirring occasionally) until softened, about 25 minutes. Add 7 c. vegetable broth, 1 tsp. dried thyme, 1/4 tsp. celery seeds, 2 bay leaves, a few grinds of pepper, 1 1/2 cups brown lentils, and a can of diced tomatoes, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, add that Parmesan rind, and simmer until the lentils are very soft, about 40 minutes. Near the end of the cooking time, add salt to taste (start with 1/4-1/2 tsp; how much you want will depend on how salty your broth was to begin with). Blend until smooth, or leave some of the soup un-blended to add texture. Optional: top with grated Parmesan cheese. Or a swirl of olive oil. Or a spoonful of yogurt. Or sauteed greens. You can’t go wrong.

I love the simplicity of your lentil soup! I make a Morroccan lentil soup but it has like 20 ingredients. Pre-Vegan days I used to always put parmesan rinds in soups to deliciousify them! I am going to try yours but make it vegan by subbing out nutritional yeast for the parmesan rind. I think it will be amazing! I will let you know. We eat soup all year. I love it. When it’s hot outside, I will often just eat the leftovers cold.

I did enjoy this soup cold for lunch this week and I think I will be eating more leftover soup cold because my microwave’s life ended in a shower of sparks this week! Your comment inspired me to pick up nutritional yeast at my co-op this week and I will try it instead next time. How much would you use? And what are your other favorite ways to use it, now that I have a bag? :)

Ok, going back through your posts is causing serious drooling. Dangerous as I haven’t had breakfast yet! Here is the deal with nutritional yeast: when I went plant based, I did it cold turkey. I bought nutritional yeast because all my new vegan cookbooks said it tasted like cheese. It. did. not….. that is, until I hadn’t eaten cheese for a month or so. Now I absolutely adore it and use it in every recipe that could be spruced up by a little cheesiness. I would start small. Add a tablespoon or a time to recipes where you would normally use cheese. Let it grow on you until you love it dearly, then start using copious amounts.

I substitutes it for cheese all the time, but sometimes it needs a medium, like tofu or cashew cream to really replace cheese in a recipe, like on pizza or in enchiladas. Adding garlic and salt helps too.

My friend who lives 12 hours away called me last night while making the Mexican Mountain. She was about to add active dry yeast to the recipe. Hilarious.

One last sorta recipe: The house dressing by Chef AJ with nutritional yeast is a dressing I cannot live without. Seriously drink it right out of the jar. Here is the youtube demo with recipe. She is AMAZING.http://www.eatunprocessed.com/ep31-40.html#40

I love lentil soups. Whole Foods sells Parmesan rinds next to the pre-grated cheese. I’ve never bought them because I have more than enough at home in my freezer. I seem to accumulate more rinds than I can use up though, so the bag is a little bit like an archeological dig: really freezer-burned ones on the bottom, fresher ones on the top!

Thanks for the tip! Your Parmesan rind situation sounds a little like my own–I cleaned out my freezer lately and was pretty impressed with how many I had squirreled away. I have been using them quite freely ever since!

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